The NDP’s Crisis Of Their Own Making

On Terrible Polls And Horrible Leaders

“His leadership has been an abject failure, and if he is given a third crack at running a national campaign, it should be a source of national shame that the Canadian left is so okay with preening nonsense and TikTok virality over seriousness and proper advocacy for the Canadians who need a better government than the Liberals would provide without a left-wing check on their power.”

I wrote that the Thursday after the Canadian election, in a piece that was clear on the need for Jagmeet Singh to resign. The need for any actual powerful New Democrats to say the same has been the one thing that has been staggeringly clear ever since that election, and their collective refusal one of the things that has shocked me ever since.

Others have been on the train since election night, including friend of the site Max Fawcett, but this is a party that clearly doesn’t care about what outsiders - even when they voted NDP in 2021, like I did - think. And that’s why it has stumbled along ever since, its head in the clouds, or more accurately up its own ass. It is incurious almost to a fault, a party that has denied bad byelection results and poll-based seat projections with an innumeracy that would make even the most dedicated grifters shocked. For a party that claims to be about thinking bigger and bolder than the neoliberal, corporate captured duopoly, it is a party that embodies the idea of doing nothing because to do anything is hard when it comes to who leads it.

The thing that is most obvious to me is that nobody outside of the NDP thinks Jagmeet is a good leader. I’ve said it on countless podcasts and written it before, but if you asked every Liberal and Conservative in Ottawa what the NDP should do, they’d all say get rid of Jagmeet. If you took an anonymous survey of Liberals and Conservatives, from the most Poilievre friendly Cons through to the old PC diehards, from the Chretien-ite centrists to the orange Liberals, nobody honestly answering what the NDP should do would say keep Jagmeet. Nobody.

I’ve written this stat a thousand times but outside of Quebec, the NDP won 28 seats in 2015. The supposedly unacceptable result for Tom Mulcair was 16 seats in Quebec and 28 outside of it. Even if you concede the 15 Quebec losses in 2019 were inevitable - which I think is likely but not certain - Jagmeet Singh went backwards in 2019 and 2021 compared to Mulcair. Tom Mulcair - the man who was unceremoniously dumped for this unconscionable failure - is both such a failure, and a high water mark even solely in English Canada that little Jagmeet could never have been expected to reach, apparently.

Plenty of the problems the NDP have aren’t really Jagmeet’s fault, and it’s worth pointing that out. I did this rant when Coletto was on the podcast this week, and if you’re a longtime reader I’m sure you can do it from memory now, but Jagmeet is not responsible for the structural reality that the NDP are two parties stuck together by first past the post, or the fact that cultural politics matters a lot more than it did 10 or 20 years ago. Voters are increasingly prioritizing cultural values in how they vote more than they did then, which makes the NDP uncomfortable. They hold together a coalition of urban progressives and students who, to take a prominent example, think that Israel is committing a genocide while having to hold seats in places like Northern Ontario and non-Vancouver/Victoria BC where the majority opinion of their voters is not going to be nearly as pro-Palestinian. I do not think there was any leader who was going to be able to put together a coalition of Powell River and Parkdale in 2025, and pretending he could have is unfair.

But what’s not unfair to point out is that he didn’t even try to grapple with the position the party finds itself in. There’s no effort to strengthen the party in rural Canada even as MPs decide not to run again, there’s no lip service paid to the regions, and there’s no effort to even consider the implications of the leadership’s decisions. He makes unilateral decisions that make no sense, as today shows. He’s going to vote for a Throne Speech to vote for Tariff relief measures before voting against the government … even though he said he’d vote against the government and for an election at “the earliest opportunity” repeatedly, including last week to David Cochrane. Definitionally, voting for tariff relief measures requires not voting against the government at the earliest opportunity, but he still claims he’s going to vote against the government at the earliest opportunity. Clear as mud.

The problem for the NDP is well litigated, but the fervent nature of that criticism doesn’t change its truth. Every conversation about the NDP this entire Parliament has lived in a weird bubble where they’re led by someone who isn’t very obviously a failure and a liar. Singh’s willingness to lie to all of us, to declare that he is in opposition to a government he has propped up for 3 years, to debase himself and his party on a weekly, and honestly sometimes daily, basis is unworthy of support and worthy of contempt. All of these notions that the NDP could take advantage of Liberal disaster were and are rooted in the idea the NDP could even take advantage of an opportunity. In the current context, they’re the opportunity to be taken advantage of.

Their polling in BC, where a majority of their 25 MPs have seats, is atrocious, meaning they’re facing losing 8 seats there. Toss in bad trends in Northern Ontario and two huge retirements there, and party status is genuinely lineball. The party is in a genuine crisis, and could be facing a significantly harder road back if their remaining caucus is significantly less working class and more focused on leftist foreign policy and social values. Hell, Singh is losing by every credible seat projection service I’ve seen, including my own.

The reason this is so fucking aggravating is that this was knowable. It was knowable the whole time, and that’s not just nonsense revisionism because this article literally quotes from a September 2021 article. The thing is, the NDP have provided a better government this time around than the majority Liberal Parliament (the COVID Parliament is impossible to assess for obvious reasons), and yet they will get destroyed and deservedly so.

We so often bemoan the death of honesty, integrity, and candour in our politics, but the reason they’re in short supply is we don’t hold politicians we like to standards. Jagmeet Singh has lied to us constantly. He has deceived, he has lied, he has pretended that words don’t mean what they actually mean. But, because he has done it all in the veneer of progressivism, the firehose of misleading statements, disinformation, bad ideas, and outright lies isn’t treated as the affront it is.

The NDP’s current crisis was knowable and known from the second they allowed him to claim the 2021 election was a success. They just didn’t listen, and now they’re about to be powerless, leaderless, reduced in seats, and irrelevant to help a single soul.